Abstract
Comedy has been employed in the service of a number of masters, politically ranging from the reactionary and conservative — ridiculing cultural outsiders to preserve the status quo — to the radical and revisionary, challenging stereotypes and disrupting the status quo. Historically, constructions of Britishness have relied upon assumptions of inclusion and exclusion, superiority and inferiority and a series of hierarchies, which have been reinforced through complementary forms of comedy. Comedy has both a political role — mimicking, commenting on, or transparently embedded in hierarchical structures of power — and a psychological one, giving voice to taboo subjects and revealing socially repressed desires or fears.
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© 2015 Sarah Ilott
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Ilott, S. (2015). Multicultural British Comedy/The Comedy of Multicultural Britain. In: New Postcolonial British Genres. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505224_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505224_5
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